Unsparing Pain, Unsparing Pleasure

Bethel Seminary Graduation Communion

Twin Cities, MN

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us
all, will he not also give us all things with him?

The passage of Scripture that I would like to open with you
tonight is found in Romans chapter eight. Romans eight is the most
precious chapter in the Bible to me, and the verse I focus on
tonight is for me the most precious verse in the chapter. The
reason it is so precious to me is that the promise in it is so
all-encompassing that it stands ready to help me at virtually every
turn in my life and ministry. There never has been and never will
be a circumstance in my life where this promise is irrelevant.

Just as I wrote that first paragraph of this message on
Wednesday afternoon, the phone rang. And the voice at the other end
said, "Hello, John, this is Beryl. Jerry died today." I wasn't sure
I had heard correctly, so I said, "What?" She said, "Jerry, my
husband, died this afternoon." I was stunned. He had spent three
hours the night before at a Trustee meeting at church. He was 54
years old, with six children. I left my sermon preparation, as I
have so often before, and drove over to Methodist Hospital. And as
I went I thought, "Yes, it is true. This most precious promise is
my help and strength for this moment and every moment in my
ministry and in my life. There is no circumstance where it is not
utterly relevant. I'll try to show that in a moment.

But that's not the only reason this verse is precious to me. It
not only contains an all-encompassing promise, it also contains
what I would call a certification or foundation or guarantee of the
promise that is so strong and so solid and so secure that there is
absolutely no possibility that the promise could ever be
broken.

The Aim of This Message

My prayer in opening this verse with you is that God might take
this connection between the foundation and the promise and make it
the unassailable core of your hope in ministry. The center that you
come back to again and again and says, "Whatever else gives way,
whatever else disappoints, whatever else fails, this never
fails--this connection between this foundation and this promise
cannot fail."

The verse is Romans 8:32, and it goes like this, referring to
God the Father: "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up
for us all, how shall he not with him freely give us all
things?"

The verse has two parts. The foundation goes like this: "God did
not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all."

A Shocking Truth

One of my friends who is a pastor in Illinois was preaching to a
group of prisoners in a state prison during Holy Week a couple
years ago. At one point in his message he paused and asked the men
if they knew who killed Jesus. Some said, the soldiers did. Some
said the Jews did. Some said Pilate. But my friend waited a moment
and then simply said, "His Father killed him."

That's what the first half of Romans 8:32 says: God did not
spare his own Son but handed him over--to death. Isaiah 53 puts it
even more bluntly, "We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and
afflicted . . . It was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has
put him to grief" (vv. 4, 10). Or as Romans 3:25 says, "God put him
forward as a propitiation by his blood." Just as Abraham lifted the
knife over the chest of his son Isaac, but then spared his son
because there was a ram in the thicket as a substitute, so God the
Father lifted the knife over the chest of his Son Jesus and did not
spare him because he was the ram--he was the substitute.

And my pastor friend told me that those hardened prisoners sat
there in silence for a moment and then said, "Why would he do
that?"

And the answer is given right here: "God did not spare his own
Son but gave him up for us all." In another place Paul says, "For
our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we
might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21). Or as Isaiah
saw it hundreds of years before it happened:

He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our
iniquities; Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, And
with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned every one to his own way; And the Lord has laid on
him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:5-6)

God did not spare his own Son, because it was the only way he
could spare us. The guilt of our transgressions, the punishment of
our iniquities, the curse of our sin--just as true for us pastors
as for the worst derelict in the world--would have brought us
inescapably to the destruction of hell. But God did not spare his
own Son but gave him up to be wounded for our transgressions, and
bruised for our iniquities and crucified for our sin.

This verse is precious to me because the foundation of the
promise to me in Romans 8:32--the certification and guarantee of
this promise--is that the Son of God bore in his body all my
punishment and all my guilt and all my condemnation and all my
blame and all my fault and all my corruption, so that I might stand
before a great and holy God, forgiven, reconciled, justified,
accepted, and the beneficiary of absolutely unspeakable promises of
pleasure for ever more at his right hand.

Following the Train of Thought

So this is the way Paul reasons: since God did not spare his own
Son, but gave him up for us all, how shall he not--surely he must,
surely he will, how can he not--freely give us all things with him.
There's the all-encompassing promise in this verse. God will most
surely, most certainly, without any doubt or any possibility of
failure, "freely give us all things with him."

Paul reasons from the hard to the easy, or from the great to the
small. If God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for
us--that's the hard thing, the great thing--then it is a
comparatively easy thing, a small thing, for God to freely give us
all things with him. A small and easy thing for God, but utterly
breathtaking for us.

"How shall he not with him freely give us all things?" Really?
All things? What does that mean? The key is found in the
immediately preceding verse. There Paul says, "If God is for us,
who is against us?" And our first response is: lots of people are
against us. Jesus said, "You will be delivered up even by parents
and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put
to death; you will be hated by all for my name's sake" (Luke
21:16-17). That's a lot of opposition.

What did Paul mean when he said, "If God is for you, who is
against you?" He meant, "Who can be successfully against you?" What
opposition could there every be against you that almighty God could
not transform into your benefit? And the answer is none. That's
what he means ultimately when he says, "How shall he not freely
with him give us all things?" There is nothing that will ever come
into your experience as God's child that, by God's sovereign grace,
will not turn out to be a benefit to you. This what it means for
God to be God, and for God to be for you, and for God to freely
give you all things with Christ.

You must believe this or you will not thrive, or perhaps even
survive, in the ministry. There is so much pain, so many setbacks
and discouragements, so many controversies and pressures. I do not
know where I would turn in the ministry if I did not believe that
almighty God is taking every setback and every discouragement and
every controversy and every pressure and every pain and stripping
it of its destructive power and making it work for the enlargement
of my joy in God?

The Gospel for Real Life

Tomorrow morning at 11:00 o'clock I will stand before several
hundred friends and family of Jerry Halldorson and try to help them
see that for Jerry and for them (if they will receive it) it is
absolutely true that even in Jerry's death God is fulfilling the
promise of Romans 8:32. And perhaps I will refer to that
magnificent parallel to Romans 8:32 in 1 Corinthians 3:21 where
Paul says to the saints at Corinth, "All things are yours, whether
Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death . . . all
are yours and you are Christ's and Christ is God's."

The world is yours. Life is yours. Death is yours. God reigns so
supremely on behalf of his elect that everything including Jerry
Halldorson's death and everything that faces you in a lifetime of
ministry has been subdued by the mighty hand of God and made the
servant of our holiness and our everlasting joy in God.

If God is for us, and if God is God, then it is true that
nothing can succeed against us. He who did not spare his own Son
but gave him up for us all, how shall he not freely with him give
us all things--all things: the world, life, death, . . .

What we are about to commemorate at this table is the foundation
and guarantee of the most all-encompassing promise in the Bible. It
is the ground of this great truth:

God spared his Son no pain that he might spare his saints no
pleasure.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

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